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Religion of Peace

Archive for August, 2010

The proposed construction of the “Cordoba” mega-mosque near Ground Zero has served as a catalyst for a renewed interest in the history of Cordoba under Islamic rule in Al-Andalus (Spain). Many of those who are opposed to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s presumed “bridge building” initiative, as represented by the project first called Cordoba House and now renamed Park51, have gone back to the history books, or have decided to speak out and address the purport of the designation: “Cordoba.” For instance, Victor Davis Hanson in a recent interview[1] alludes to “the rather silly evocation of Cordoba; in toto, it was not really a utopian medieval city of understanding.” And Lisa Graas shows[2] that “things started out rather bad under Muslim rule…and went downhill over time…The history for us is clear and it is a history that no Catholic would like to see a repeat of in Manhattan.” Cordoba Jews fared better for a time, as Jane Gerber lavishly chronicles in The Jews of Spain[3], but they too eventually fell victim to persecution. Even the renowned Jewish sage Moses Maimonides[4] was forced to flee the city, escaping to Fez where he lived for years disguised as a Muslim.

And yet all this should have been evident in the weeks and months after the Twin Towers were destroyed and nearly three thousand people were murdered by so-called “Islamist” terrorists. For it would not take long before Muslim and non-Muslim apologists for the “religion of peace” would hearken back to the ostensibly genial and temperate era of Moorish Spain, a time, we were instructed, when Christians and Jews were welcomed by their Muslim overlords and peacefully integrated into the life of the realm, permitted to worship freely and even received into the learned professions, many as katibs (secretaries) to the Caliph. Such conjurings by journalists and pundits constituted nothing less than an intellectual embarrassment. Mutatis mutandis, these fairy tale votaries resembled an updated version of Danny Kaye and crew singing “Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen[5],” that “friendly old girl of a town.”

I recall coming across numerous references to the splendors of Cordoba in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy, which were obviously intended to deflect indignation and fury and to distill for a supposedly vulgar multitude the deeper meaning of Islam. For example, in order to strengthen and validate a benign conception of Islam, attention was (and still is) frequently drawn to the intellectual activity of Cordoba, in particular to the translation and transmission of the seminal texts of the classical world that would otherwise have been lost to mankind. What such advocates for the great Islamic contribution to the Western library forgot is that none of this material was original to Islam.

As David Bentley Hart writes in Atheist Delusions[6], “Islam was the beneficiary of Eastern Christendom.” It was “Syriac-speaking Christians who provided an invaluable caste of scholars and physicians, and through them the achievements of Greek and Roman antiquity passed into Islamic culture.” In fact, not Moorish Spain but medieval Italy was “perhaps a more important port of entry for Greek texts into Western Europe…in the late eleventh century,” when scholars, poets, clerics and doctors fled from the Muslim conquest of Constantinople to Pisa, Venice and Palermo. But resonant specifics are precisely what the glib justifiers of a presumably Islamic monument to human progress, of Cordoba as a shining city on the hill, have labored to suppress.

The point they were (and are) trying to make, of course, is that this particular epoch represents the essence of Islam, a religion which, according to President Obama, advances “the dignity of all human beings,” and which was later hijacked by extremists who perverted the root message of the faith. The destruction of the WTC and the human carnage of the event was, somehow, an aberration, a “man-caused disaster” which had nothing to do with the real Islam. Ground Zero was only a grotesque distortion of the true Islamic inglenook where marchers for peace warm their bunions.

In order to maintain this fantasy, there is no recognition of the fact that the suicide terrorists, as Charles Krauthammer points out in an article titled “Moral Myopia at Ground Zero[7],” “were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement…with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm and with an archipelago of local sympathizers.” Those who defend the Cordoba project, dreaming the dream of pastoral reconciliation betokened by what is, at least in part, an Andalusian mirage, facilitate the task of the jihadists.

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As I argued in The Big Lie[8], which I began writing in September 2001 a few days after the catastrophe (and which was published in 2007), the golden age of Moorish Spain that features in the history books and glitters in the public imagination is, to a significant degree, something of a historical fiction: the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties were by no means an unbroken halcyon interregnum in the annals of Islam but cruel and intolerant dispensations given to fervid and prolonged outbursts of savagery. Even the famed Caliphate of Cordoba, as Hanson and others indicate, was not the uniformly enlightened Castle in Spain of popular fancy. Islamic tolerance, as Bat Ye’or in her The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam[9]unpacks for us, is more of a modern fable than a historical verity.

Nothing is ever uni-dimensional when it comes to historical exegesis; complexities must always be allowed for. The history of Cordoba, which Richard Fletcher masterfully elaborates in Moorish Spain[10], was exceedingly chequered: “years of peace and plenty under the Caliphs of the tenth century,” patronage of the intellectual and scientific disciplines and economic prosperity, broken by years of turbulence, political intrigues, exactions of tribute, fratricidal strife, sumptuary laws, vestimentary differentiation, slavery and in general the ill treatment of minorities. Ultimately, as Fletcher writes, “The simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was a land of tranquility.” One wing of the historical diptych is impressive in the context of the age; the other is disfigured with the limning of atrocities. It is this second panel that is left out of the picture of Cordoba that has been painted for us.

And that is the trouble. A half-truth readily morphs into a complete lie. The misery and spoliation of conquered peoples, the executions and martyrdoms, the humiliation and oppression which is also Cordoba, are airbrushed out of the historical register. Amnesia and “bridge-building” are the order of the day. The pristine figment of an idealized Cordoba, the cherished beacon of tolerance and enlightenment in an otherwise dark and barbarous period, is meant to disarm skepticism in the present. “Cordoba” is, paradoxically, code for both grandeur and deception. I would respectfully suggest that the Shanksville memorial[11] in honor of the heroic victims of Flight 93, currently under construction and scheduled to be dedicated on September 11, 2011—which is, interestingly enough, also the slated opening date[12] of the Cordoba mosque—might be a far more relevant and exalted pledge of remembrance than a minaret at Ground Zero.

Meanwhile, a vast chorus of Islamophiles are still busy warbling a melodious ditty to the pleasures, delights and glories of an immaculate Cordoba, a wonderful, wonderful Cordoba with its “welcome so warm and gay,” the Copenhagen of its day of which the Park51 mosque is touted as an exemplar and a revival. It is pitched to an increasingly dubious public as a metaphorical “bridge” to the long-desired destination of ecumenical harmony. Perhaps it should just be called al-Qantara, “the Bridge,” rather than the inscrutable Park51.

A bridge, however, is not always what it seems. Richard Fletcher reminds us that “the first mosque in Cordoba was built on a central site in the city near the Roman bridge over the river Guadalquivir.” The parallel is striking. The thirteen-storey high Cordoba House mosque is planned for the “central site” in New York City near the place where an architectural cynosure once stood. Is the mosque a bridge or a structure meant to overshadow it?

Questions remain. Assuming it is some kind of bridge, who is crossing it? Which way does traffic flow? Both ways? Or is it rather a permanent and grandiose pontoon intended to facilitate an inexorable invasion under cover of “mutual understanding,” what former Muslim and author[13] Sayed Kamran Mirza calls[14] “an iconic symbol of Islamic victory”? And where exactly will we find ourselves once the bridge has been crossed? In the modern or the medieval age? In New York? Or in Cordoba?

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf claims that the U.S. Constitution is Shariah compliant. Let us examine below a few laws of Shariah to see if Imam Rauf is truthful or a fraud:

Jihad, defined as “to war against non-Muslims to establish the religion,” is the duty of every Muslim and Muslim head of state (caliph). Muslim caliphs who refuse jihad are in violation of Shariah and unfit to rule.

A caliph can hold office through seizure of power, meaning through force.

A caliph is exempt from being charged with serious crimes such as murder, adultery, robbery, theft, drinking and in some cases of rape.

A percentage of Zakat (charity money) must go toward jihad.

It is obligatory to obey the commands of the Caliph, even if he is unjust.

A caliph must be a Muslim, a non-slave and a male.

The Muslim public must remove the caliph if he rejects Islam.

A Muslim who leaves Islam must be killed immediately.

A Muslim will be forgiven for murder of: 1) an apostate, 2) an adulterer, and 3) a highway robber – making vigilante street justice and honor killing acceptable.

Shariah never abolished slavery or sexual slavery and highly regulates it. A master will not be punished for killing his slave.

Shariah dictates death by stoning, beheading, amputation of limbs, flogging – even for crimes of sin such as adultery.

Non-Muslims are not equal to Muslims under the law. They must comply with Islamic law if they are to remain safe. They are forbidden to marry Muslim women, publicly display wine or pork, recite their Scriptures or openly celebrate their religious holidays or funerals. They are forbidden from building new churches or building them higher than mosques. They may not enter a mosque without permission. A non-Muslim is no longer protected if he leads a Muslim away from Islam.

It is a crime for a non-Muslim to sell weapons to someone who will use them against Muslims. Non-Muslims cannot curse a Muslim, say anything derogatory about Allah, the Prophet, or Islam, or expose the weak points of Muslims. But the same does not apply to Muslims.

A non-Muslim cannot inherit from a Muslim.

Banks must be Shariah compliant, and interest is not allowed.

No testimony in court is acceptable from people of low-level jobs, such as street sweepers or bathhouse attendants. Women in low-level jobs such as professional funeral mourners cannot keep custody of their children in case of divorce.

A non-Muslim cannot rule even over a non-Muslim minority.

Homosexuality is punishable by death.

There is no age limit for marriage of girls. The marriage contract can take place any time after birth and consummated at age 8 or 9.

Rebelliousness on the part of the wife nullifies the husband’s obligation to support her, and gives him permission to beat her and keep her from leaving the home.

Divorce is only in the hands of the husband and is as easy as saying, “I divorce you,” and becomes effective even if the husband did not intend it.

There is no community property between husband and wife, and the husband’s property does not automatically go to the wife after his death.

A woman inherits half what a man inherits.

A man has the right to have up to four wives, and she has no right to divorce him even if he is polygamous.

The dowry is given in exchange for the woman’s sexual organs.

A man is allowed to have sex with slave women and women captured in battle, and if the enslaved woman is married, her marriage is annulled.

The testimony of a woman in court is half the value of a man.

A woman loses custody if she remarries.

To prove rape, a woman must have four male witnesses.

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A rapist may only be required to pay the bride-money (dowry) without marrying the rape victim.

A Muslim woman must cover every inch of her body, which is considered “Awrah,” a sexual organ. Not all Shariah schools allow the face of a woman exposed.

A Muslim man is forgiven if he kills his wife at the time he caught her in the act of adultery. However, the opposite is not true for women since he “could be married to the woman he was caught with.”

It is obligatory for a Muslim to lie if the purpose is obligatory. That means that for the sake of abiding with Islam’s commandments, such as jihad, a Muslim is obliged to lie and should not have any feelings of guilt or shame associated with this kind of lying.

The above are clear-cut laws in Islam decided by great imams after years of examination and interpretation of the Quran, Hadith and Muhammad’s life. Now let the learned Imam Rauf tell us what part of the above is compliant with the U.S. Constitution.

If someone had taken a poll on September 12, 2001 asking Americans if they believed there was any possibility that less than a decade later America would be governed by a president of Muslim descent, with a Muslim middle name, surrounded by Muslim friends and advisors, a president who sat in a house of worship in which “Goddamn America” was spewed from the pulpit, and who would support the building of a Muslim house of worship on the site of the worst terrorist attack on US soil in the history of the country, I would venture to guess that over 90% of the respondents would have answered with a resounding “No!”

Yet here we are, nine years later, with just that scenario and 24% of Americans actually believing that their president is a closet Muslim. No matter what Americans now believe, twenty months into this “transformational” presidency, the relevant question is whether Obama entered the White House with biases that impact on his ability to govern in a manner that is in the best interests of the country and its citizens.

While it is clear that Obama entered office with an ideologically driven agenda, what is only now becoming apparent is that his far left, socialist beliefs are only part of what inspire him to pursue policies that are harmful to the country. It is the combination of his progressivism and Obama’s ties to the Muslim world that have shaped his values. Lump in his hubristic notion that he has the ability to heal the decades long divide between the West and the Muslim world — and we end up with a foreign policy turning America into a “dhimmi” country.[i] Americans are becoming subservient to a Muslim friendly government at the expense of a secure future.

Much has been written about Obama’s Muslim outreach that began in his first moments in office with his first official phone call to Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, his first television interview given to Al-Arabiya, and his trip to the Mideast culminating in his infamous Cairo speech. But of greater concern are the various statements and actions not only of Obama, but also other influential Democrats, which should cause us to pause and wonder whether the country is, in fact, creeping toward eventually embracing Sharia law.

Last month the news broke that the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, was asked by Obama “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering.”

In the conservative world, the backlash was huge. Watch Charles Krauthammer as he concludes, “This is a new height in fatuousness.” Mona Charen stated:

“[S]olicitude about the feelings of individuals cannot comprise a foreign policy. Muslim nations, like other nations, are motivated by advantage and influenced by perceptions of strength and weakness. The president has absolutely no control over the way Muslims feel about themselves — but he has every power over the way they perceive us.”

Recently, Senator John Kerry introduced a bill in the Senate intended to create a two-way professional exchange program that would allow young Americans to work in Muslim countries and citizens of those countries to live in the US.

Forgive my cynicism but our government has expended massive resources in the form of money, manpower, and bureaucracy in order to track down terrorists. Multiple arrests recently of homegrown terrorists illustrate the dangers of shipping young Americans off to Muslim countries. Furthermore, many of the 9/11 terrorists were in the US on student visas. Does the Department of Homeland Security really need more work added to its plate so that far-left liberals can feel good about taking the country down the path of appeasement?

Kerry attempted to sell his proposal in an article on Huffington Post in which he stated, “We have come a long way in the past year in helping turn a page in America’s relations with the world’s Muslims, and President Obama deserves enormous credit.”

God help us with people like this making laws and running the country. Any informed person must realize that America’s relations with the Muslim world have not improved under the Obama outreach program and, in fact, they have only deteriorated. Arab perception of the Obama administration is at an all time low, Iran is moments away from a nuclear bomb; and all the while, the Great Satan’s global power is on the decline. But Kerry was right on one point, Obama deserves all the credit for the state of affairs.

Most recently, Obama’s latest addition to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, drew attention as she was accused of actively promoting Sharia law — an accusation steeped in strong evidence from her days as Dean of Harvard Law School.

Last week, as Muslims began the observance of Ramadan, Democrats were falling all over each other with public pronouncements of good wishes for the holiday. The Treasury Department issued a statement recognizing “the importance of this period of intense devotion, reflection and charitable giving.” Hillary Clinton stated that “American Muslims make valuable contributions to our country every day and millions will honor this month with acts of service and giving back to their communities.” And Nancy Pelosi issued the following statement:

“It is a time to honor the traditions of the Muslim faith, and an opportunity for all Americans to celebrate the tradition of pluralism, tolerance, diversity, and religious freedom embedded in the very fabric of our Constitution and our history.”

This is coming from the woman who suggested that Americans who oppose the Ground Zero Mosque should be investigated. It is too bad that Nancy Pelosi governs in ways completely antithetical to the ideas of pluralism, tolerance, and diversity she so graciously espouses for Muslims.

Which leads to Obama’s support for the right of Muslims to build a victory mosque at Ground Zero. With claims by the State Department that Imam Rauf is a Muslim with a “moderate perspective,” one has to wonder what this administration considers “moderate.” For this is a man with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, who refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and who believes that the US was responsible for 9/11 and the creation of Osama bin Laden. But as Lee Smith recently analyzed:

“Many have argued that Rauf’s refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organization is evidence that despite the many testimonies on his behalf, the Tribeca imam is not a ‘moderate’ Muslim cleric and perhaps has extremist tendencies. Maybe that’s the case, but let’s put it in perspective: The White House’s counterterrorism czar John Brennan believes there are moderate elements in Hezbollah and actually has the wherewithal to design a policy of rapprochement with a terrorist organization.”

To make matters worse, the State Department has dispatched this Sharia-touting Imam to the Mideast as a representative of the United States. In a wonderful, yet scary, assessment of Rauf’s Shariah Index Project, Christine Brim questioned whether America’s governing elites are complicit in helping the Imam to force Sharia law on America:

“The issues at stake here are about Americans protecting the Constitution from Shariah-adherent groups using the protective guise of religious freedom to attack the Constitution itself – using a triumphal Ground Zero mosque as ‘the base’ for a project to institutionalize Shariah in America.”

As the pieces fall in place, it seems no surprise then that this same man advised Obama in the aftermath of last year’s illegitimate elections in Iran:

“He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution — to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.”

Just as Americans never dreamt of the possibility of electing a man with Obama’s background nine years ago, they likely would never imagine Sharia compliant courts governing side by side with those guided by the Constitution. But, having fallen into a post-9/11 slumber, Americans must not underestimate the implications of Obama’s Muslim-friendly policies and his extreme Sharia-compliant friends. Andrew McCarthy noted in a recent article, “Which Islam Will Prevail in America?”

“The United States is not going to become a sharia state anytime soon. That obvious fact has commentators pooh-poohing the encroaching peril, even as we watch Europe succumb before our eyes, as if no-go zones, honor killings, the Balkanizing of society, and the strangulation of freedom could never happen here.”

Sharia courts now officially operate in England in parallel to the British system, judging civil matters offered to the court by Muslims agreeing to be bound by traditional Sharia law. As of June, 2009, 85 such courts were estimated to be working tribunals, operating mainly from mosques and settling financial and domestic disputes. To ignore this transformational president’s true vision for the future of the country is to do so at our peril.

[i] A dhimmi (Arabic: ذمي‎ [ˈðɪmːiː]), (collectively أهل الذمة ahl al-dhimmah, “the people of the dhimma or people of the contract”) is a non-Muslim subject of a state governed in accordance with sharia law.

GAZA!!!

The current disagreement over the Ground Zero Mosque is an important historical stop on a long timeline of cultural debate between Islamic supremacists and the West. Recruits and devotees of these violent Arab Islamic supremacists, such as Nidal Hasan, Faisal Shahzad, and Hosam Husein Smadi, all have something in common in their recent acts of terrorism. They all passionately believed the argument that the United States is mistreating Muslims. They felt this so strongly that they were willing to kill dozens if not hundreds of innocent people in order to communicate the “death as text” argument authored by their overlords in groups such as al-Qaeda.

The proliferation of these radicals raises questions about our own epistemic communities. Journalists, pundits, and our bloated politically correct elite class foster this pathological sense of anti-Americanism as part of their own self-centered moralism. Mere hours before Shahzad was stopped, Mayor Bloomberg could not help but gush at the ideologically bigoted guess that someone angry about the health insurance legislation had set the bomb at Times Square. Bloomberg continues to blunder over the recent Ground Zero Mosque.

Hasan, Shahzad, and Smadi did not have to sit at the knee of a bin Laden or Ahmadinejad to hold their views; they could read most of our popular newspapers, watch our television news, blog news such as at Huffington Post, or read popular books to gain the misguided notion that America is bigoted, mean, hateful, and violent toward Muslims. In one of my recent college classes here in Dallas, after the prevented bombing of one of the city’s largest buildings by a Jordanian supremacist, I asked students to name any arguments that could be made to Muslims that the United States has helped Muslims. The debate class was silent and unable to muster a single argument.

That lack of argument is the great danger of our time. America is in fact the greatest defender of justice and well-being for Muslims, and our collective intelligentsia have for years refused to reveal the argument of “America helping Muslims” that could be saving so many more innocent human lives today and demobilizing the human predators rallying around the Ground Zero mosque funding.

Here are some arguments average Americans may want to rehearse if they hope to prevail in this global debate:

Americans have given thousands of their youngest, best and brightest in combat to save Muslims. This provides a number of important counterarguments to anti-American radicals who ground their rhetoric in the religion of Islam.

1. The world recently commemorated the inexcusable 15th anniversary of Srebrenica, where U.N. forces allowed 8,000 Muslim men to be massacred. In the 1995 military intervention in Yugoslavia, the United States lead a NATO military coalition, against the wishes of the United Nations, to rescue a Muslim minority from ethnic extermination by Serbian President Milosevic. The extermination was typified by the U.N.’s failed defense of Muslims at Srebrenica. There was no member of the intervening coalition from a Middle East Islamic nation. Today, that minority enjoys a new sovereign state created for their benefit by the United States — Kosovo.

2. The United States, in its first war with the government of Iraq in 1991, liberated the 2.5 million Muslims of Kuwait. Since that time, Kuwait has consequently adopted a greater measure of political freedom, including the right of women to vote. Saddam Hussein was by his own political definitions a secular Baathist dedicated to oppressing and suppressing Muslims in his own country and in Kuwait when he conquered it in 1991. The United States ended his rule of Kuwait and established humanitarian no-fly zones over Northern Iraq and Southern Iraq to protect Muslim dissidents in those regions.

3. In the second war with the anti-Muslim government of Saddam Hussein, the United States lost more than 4,000 men and women combating former Baathist radicals and al-Qaeda radicals in the country. Even the viciously anti-American Lancet report acknowledged that more than 75% of the civilian deaths in Iraq during the war were directed by anti-American forces against Muslims. The relative peace that has returned to Iraq since 2006 primarily benefits human life in Muslim communities of Iraq.

4. The Iraq war of 2003 ended the deadliest military rivalry ever fought since the end of World War II — the Iran/Iraq war. That war, fought during the 1980s, killed more than one million Muslims, utilizing chemical weapons, forced conscription of teenage males, and an array of grotesque inhumanities that never garnered any major “antiwar” movements in Europe or the United States. The ethically pretentious antiwar movement sat on its hands during the epic annihilation which primarily victimized Muslims.

5. Whatever one thinks of the oil trade, it is definitively the largest transfer of wealth in human history from affluent societies to impoverished societies. Since at least 1973, roughly one trillion dollars has been transferred annually from the economies of Japan, the U.S., Europe, and China to the Middle Eastern oil-producing states. In many instances, the United States imposed embargoes in defense of human rights for Muslims in places such as Iran and Iraq — increasing the cost and limiting the consumption of such imports to the U.S. Many of those oil-producing states have chosen to use that wealth inappropriately, but the oil can hardly be argued to be “stolen” or “imperial American acquisitions.”

6. The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan brought to an end the inhumane rule of the Taliban for more than 20 million Muslims who live there. The Taliban constituted one of the most misogynist governments in human history. Delighting in public executions at soccer stadiums where family members were compelled to discharge AK-47s in the skulls of “adulterers,” this government murdered Muslim women in order to create its own despicable spectacle of governance by terror. Today, those marginalized and dissident members of the Taliban ride about on motorcycles throwing acid in the faces of liberated schoolgirls across the Afghan countryside in hopes of returning to power.

7. In 2005, Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, populated by more than 200 million adherents, was struck by a deadly tsunami, which killed more than 150,000 people. The theological center of Islam — Saudi Arabia — provided a paltry ten million dollars in aid for victims. But Indonesia was struck by another tsunami soon after: a tidal wave of charitable giving from the U.S. The United States government provided almost one billion dollars in aid. Private charitable giving by private individual Americans provided another $800 million.

8. More than $370 billion in remittances is provided annually by the United States economy to the world. Many billions of these dollars flow to countries such as Kuwait, Lebanon, and Iran. These funds benefit Muslim communities in these countries. Remittances are funds earned in the United States by family members but sent back to communities in their host country.

9. The United States does provide demonstrable religious freedom unlike any other place in the world. While European governments tightly regulate what is recognized as a legitimate religion, the United States does in fact allow the free exercise of religion — including millions of Muslims. In sharp contrast, converts from Islam in Muslim nations such as Saudi Arabia face death sentences for a well-known crime called “apostasy.”

10. The U.S. war on terrorism destroys radicals who have as their first and most significant victims Muslims who disagree with their violent supremacist interpretations of Islam. When young girls are murdered by these radicals all around the world in the form of “honor” killings, it is rarely non-Muslims who are killed. These are Muslim women dying at the hands of these bizarre misogynists. The terrorists disproportionately kill Muslims. This is why in Iraq, hatred of al-Qaeda is higher than it is in the United States. Iraqis witness on a daily basis the peculiar logic of bombings targeted at marketplaces where Muslims shop with their families. It is practices like these that are turning Muslims against groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Ultimately, terrorism is but a tactic in a larger war of ideas. We must all be prepared with reasons and arguments to defend beliefs such as American patriotism. The continuation of the “America mistreats Muslims” meme creates and bolsters the rationales motivating this violence around the world. These terror radicals are not crazy. These radicals have been taught and nurtured by our own self-deprecating intellectual communities as to the legitimate self-loathing Americans should feel for their “arrogance,” “pride,” “narrow-mindedness,” and “callous feelings” toward the international body politic. This intellectual indictment is painfully false and misdirected at humanity’s great heroes and nurturers rather than humanity’s murdering thugs. The pundits who pander to these deadly radicals in the misguided view of “helping Muslims” are hurting us all — the entire human family.

Ben Voth is the chair of communication and director of debate at Southern Methodist University.

Muslim Friends

by Bill Warner

August 27, 2010

When you read the comments section of an article about Islam, you will see the argument: I have some Muslim friends and they are good people. The conclusion: good Muslims mean that Islam is good. If the talk is face-to-face, the person may ask: Do you have any Muslim friends? There is a hidden implication that if you do not, then you don’t really know anything about Islam and you could be a bigot.

What is actually going on? The Kafir (non-Muslim) with Muslim friends does not know any real facts about Islam and wants to move the argument to feelings, not facts. If the Muslim friend is nice, Islam is nice. There is no need to know any facts about Islam. And, if Islam is nice, then speaking against it is bigotry.

It is amazing how much people can talk about Islam and never mention a single fact. It is easy to tell if someone is speaking about Islam factually. A fact-based discussion will include the Koran and the Sunna, which means that the words Mohammed and Allah will be heard. If there is no Mohammed or Allah, then the discussion is not about the facts of Islam; it is about opinions that come from the media, authorities and the web.

Here are questions to ask people with Muslim friends.

· Do you have any Muslim apostate friends?

An apostate is one who has left Islam and under Sharia law may be murdered. Who would know more about the true nature of Islam than someone who knows it at the core of their being? The apostate knows both sides of the story.
Here are other questions to ask those with Muslim friends:

· Do you have any Christian friends from the Middle East?
· Do you have any Armenian, Serbian or Coptic friends?

These people have suffered cultural and religious annihilation by Islam over the past 1400 years, shouldn’t you also meet them? About 60 million Christians have been murdered over the last 1400 years, and Armenians, Serbians, Copts (Egyptians) and the rest of the Christians of the Middle East furnished the body count. Doesn’t it make sense to talk to who has personal experience in engaging Islam?

There are other questions to be asked. There are 13 verses in the Koran that say that a Muslim is not the friend of a Kafir. How can this not be talked about? According to Islam, we are Kafirs. Why can’t friends talk about such things?

Koran 4:144 Believers! Do not take kafirs as friends over fellow believers. Would you give Allah a clear reason to punish you?

What this means is that a Muslim may be friendly with a Kafir, but if a Muslim has a choice between favoring a Kafir or a Muslim, he will favor the Muslim. Why can’t this be discussed among friends?

Now to the most critical question: Is a Muslim ever really the friend of a Kafir? Any Muslim who fully accepts the doctrine of Islam cannot be the true friend of a Kafir—friendly, yes, but not a true friend. If he is a true friend, then he is not obeying the Koran and not following the Sunna of Mohammed.

The difference between friendly and a friend is that a Muslim who is true friend will sometimes choose the Kafir’s side in a dispute about it. A friendly Muslim will be pleasant, but will always choose Islam’s side in any politics or dispute about Islam. A Muslim friend who is a true friend will listen to reasonable criticisms and occasionally tell you that you have a point there. The Muslim Arabic FBI translators who cheered on 9/11 were quite friendly, but chose Islam over the Kafirs on 9/11.

This does not mean that a person, who calls himself or herself a Muslim, cannot be a real friend. They may see the Golden Rule as more attractive than Islam’s dualistic ethics. If they can see the other person as not being a Kafir, but a human being, then they can be a true friend.

It is important to see that these ideas concern implications about the practical application of Islamic doctrine. In this case the Islamic doctrine of friends is examined. These ideas are not about any particular person who calls themselves a Muslim. Generally, to be a Muslim, you must act according to Islamic doctrine. However, the term Muslim has come to mean anybody with any degree of adherence to Islamic doctrine, however if such a person adopts the Kafir Golden Rule then they can be a fine person and a fine friend.

This friend business is perhaps one of the worst parts of the Islamic ideology and shows how great the divide is between Islam and all other doctrines.

Bill Warner,
Director, Center for the Study of Political IslamPermalink
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Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East.

For every slave captured many others died.

Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.

Oddly enough there were not enough Jews killed in jihad to significantly affect the totals of the Great Annihilation. The jihad in Arabia was 100 percent effective, but the numbers were in the thousands, not millions.

After that, the Jews submitted and became the dhimmis (servants and second class citizens) of Islam and did not have geographic political power.

This gives a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.

270,000,000: THAT’S WAY MORE THAN STALIN, HITLER, MAO, POL POT, IDI AMIN, AND THE REST OF THE 20TH CENTURY’S GENOCIDAL SOCIALISTS!

FOR GOOD REASONS, THE LEFT LOVES TO HATE THE SPANISH INQUISITION, THE KKK, AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE USA. THEW LEFT HAS NO PROBLEM CALLING THE SPANISH INQUISITION AND THE KKK AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BARBARIC.

SO WHY DON’T THEY CRITICIZE ISLAM – WHICH IS DEMONSTRABLY WORSE THAN ALL THREE COMBINED!?!?

IN FACT, NO IDEOLOGY HAS BEEN AS GENOCIDAL AS ISLAM…

NOR HAS ANY IDEOLOGY BEEN SO BLOODTHIRSTY FOR SO LONG. FOR CENTURIES…

NOR HAS ANY IDEOLOGY EVER BEEN AS ANTI-LIBERTY, ANTI-DEMOCRACY – OR AS ANTI-WOMAN.